There are a couple of funny things about this photo.
First, if you don’t recognize the scene, this bold mallard is apparently taking selfies on top of a Peregrine Falcon nesting platform. This is especially dangerous as the Peregrine Falcon is so fond of eating duck, its old-timey, colloquial street name is actually “The Duck Hawk.” How this bold mallard came to find itself up here on my Peregrine Prey Cam is anybody’s guess. But this photo is from early April and taken while Jo Durt & Kids on Grass were laying their eggs. Probably the worst possible time for such a stunt.
The second funny thing is how long it took me to find this photo for you. Kathy & I have seven cams at out at seven nests, taking millions of photos of the activity there. While these photos are so numerous they need to be processed by a machine brain, whenever we pull the cards we just can’t help but randomly peek to see what kind of stuff we might have captured. America’s Bravest Duck was one of those I just found by luck. I meant to save it somewhere special but I never did.
And then for some reason I became obsessed with finding it and wasted an embarrassing number of hours pouring through gigabytes of Peregrine Prey Project photos just to share it with you.
So I really, really hope you enjoy “America’s Bravest Duck!”
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And in case you’re curious, yes, our machine correctly identified this photo as “prey.” And special thanks to photographer and tireless raptor volunteer Randy G. Lubischer for expertly and effortlessly captioning “America’s Bravest Duck”
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